A forum for personal essays about Wikimedia projects. Because these are usually not delivered from a neutral point of view, they should be summarized on neutral issues pages from multiple points of view using formats such as TIPAESA or its subset IPA. There is a degree of freedom in determining what is related to Wikimedia projects, which makes Meta also a meatball wiki of sorts, discussing such matters as wiki culture and patterns. Documentation of MediaWiki is mainly excluded now (see below). This role includes more formal research and related discussion.

Komunumo

It has often been discussed whether Meta has a community.
What's sure is that it doesn't have a community of its own, separate from the communities of the Wikimedia projects: as someone said, «a meta-project — existing for and about the other Wikimedia wikis, not as a content project to itself — a community of communities, rather than its own little island community».[1]

This also means that many discussions, processes and other activities happen on Meta, with different participants and people in charge (if any) — for instance, among many, some Wikimedia committees, the stewards, the WMF staff for grants —: none of them, and all of them, is Meta. Meta is the space and the tool for their participants to achieve their objectives, not an actor in them; and even less a power over them.

Strictly speaking, however, there is a community specific to Meta: it's a loose group of people regularly active in some or many such activities (especially as "gardeners"), who care about Meta serving the purpose above, and who are more likely to intervene to ensure it does.[2]

Devenoj

Meta-Wiki was first created as "Meta-Wikipedia" in November 2001 to make the English Wikipedia less cluttered, by moving all meta-content (content about the Wikipedia website and its users), as opposed to actual content (encyclopedia articles), to a new wiki. Since its upgrade to Wikipedia's custom MediaWiki software, Meta has become a multilingual discussion forum used by all Wikimedia language communities. As the number of Wikimedia projects and translations increased, so too did Meta's scope. Meta comprises 93 214 articles. Many of the older pages here are still worded as being specific to Wikipedia, but arguably many now apply to all Wikimedia projects.